


Markiplier... IN SPAAACE

by shy_fox



Category: markiplier - Fandom
Genre: Mark Fischbach - Freeform, Markiplier - Freeform, SPAAACE, Spaace, space, space travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-06-05 21:34:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6724384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shy_fox/pseuds/shy_fox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark Fischbach has always wanted to go into space. When faster-than-light travel is accidentally invented, a company called Mercer Dynamics wants to make his dream a reality. There's just one condition - he has to continue making videos!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mercer Dynamics

The invention of faster-than-light travel had been a complete surprise to everyone, but most especially to the group who’d invented it. No one could argue that it wasn’t a benefit as it allowed humanity to reach out and touch the stars - it allowed ordinary humans to achieve their dreams of going into space. 

 

Mark Fischbach was considered by many to be an exceptional human, but privately considered himself average. As far as he was concerned his only skills were being loud and failing at video games in front of an accidental audience of millions. When his phone rang one afternoon, he couldn't have known that answering it was going to change his life. The woman who'd called asked him if he'd be interested in going into space to field test a project. Mark dropped the pen he was fiddling with.

“Real space? 

_ “Yep, real space! My name is Cindy Taylor and I work for Mercer Dynamics. We're attempting to test ways of getting information back to the planet from very distant ships much more quickly than our current methods and with better quality. An intense packet load like uploading videos would be ideal - which is where you come in. It's also great publicity for everyone involved!” _

Mark listened with a growing smile - he'd been worried about abandoning his fans but space travel would have had to have won simply because  **space** .

 

The woman explained a little about the project - they were a private technology company who'd come up with a way to both speed up transmission and minimise data loss. There was a lucrative government contract up for grabs if they could prove that it worked in the field, hence the mission.    
_ “Now there’s no 100% guarantee that we can send the data all the time, because we legally can’t 100% guarantee anything. However we’re very, very sure that we’ll be able to let you upload your videos with no downtime.” _

Mark bit his lip - he was so excited!

_ “So would you mind coming in for an interview and physical exam? We need to make sure you’re a-ok to go into space, and you won’t go crazy and try to kill everyone!” _

The woman giggled: that was disturbing.

“Y-yeah sure I’ll come for an interview.” 

The woman on the phone told him the address to come to that afternoon and they arranged a time. He hung up and punched the air a few times: he was (potentially) going into space!

 

*

Mercer Dynamics occupied a brand-new silver skyscraper with their name blazoned on the top of it, busy business people buzzing to and fro through the doors. Mark headed for the front doors, passing under a smaller Mercer Dynamics sign and heading for the front desk. A large uniformed security guard appraised people as they passed by, heading for barriers on either side, and Mark cleared his throat. The man focused on him and then blinked.

“Yes?”   
Mark fidgeted.

“I’m Mark Fischbach… here to see Cindy Taylor.”

The guard consulted a tablet and then nodded.

“Ah yeah.”   
He passed Mark the tablet and a stylus. 

“Sign here, please.”

Mark scrawled his signature and was handed a ‘Visitor’ pass.

“Keep that on you at all times. If you’ll wait over there, I’ll call Miss Taylor.”   
Mark thanked him and wandered over to the indicated lounge area, clipping his visitor pass to his jacket and taking a seat on a plush couch.

 

“Hiya Mark!”   
Cindy Taylor looked nothing like Mark was expecting - from her voice he thought she’d be short young and blonde. The woman before him was almost as tall as he was, older with greying brown hair. She wore a neat brown pinstripe suit jacket and skirt, and a frilly white something tucked under her chin. Mark stood up and shook her hand.

“I’m Cindy, nice to meet you… if you wanna follow me?”

She led the way across the foyer and swiped her pass to gain access through the barriers - he copied her and passed through the glass barrier, and then followed her to a lift. 

“This isn’t what I was expecting.”

The lift doors opened and Cindy shot him a smile.

“You were expecting some kind of lab full of people in white coats hunched over computers?”

Mark nodded and shrugged. Cindy looked at her watch and then looked at him.

“We have time, how about a quick tour?”

Mark found himself swept along, viewing lab after lab while Cindy talked endlessly about a staggering amount of different projects.

“Of course, the hyperspeed information relay project is our current breadwinner but our CEO never puts all her eggs in one basket. We’re constantly trying to keep up with her ideas!”   
Cindy laughed and gestured to the lab through the window before them: it was full of strange leafy plants in different coloured soils and people carefully tending them. 

 

They moved on, going from lab to lab - the sheer amount of projects underway made Mark’s head spin. Cindy checked her watch again and then hurried him back into the lift. She scanned her pass and jabbed a button at the top of the list. They rode the lift all the way up to the top of the building and the doors opened to a small open room with a desk to one side and an impressive door straight ahead. The nameplate on it read Cindy Taylor but the owner walked straight past it and knocked on the door before opening it.

“Ms Grey?”

They were apparently summoned inside, because Cindy turned and beckoned to Mark. He followed her through the door and took in his surroundings - the majority of the floor was taken up by lab equipment behind a glass wall covered in biohazard symbols, with a small area dedicated to the world’s messiest CEO desk. A woman was standing by a large machine wearing a labcoat, pale hair glinting in the lighting, and she absently waved the pair of them towards the desk.

“Ms Grey will be with you in a moment she’s just finishing up her experiment.”   
Cindy indicated one of the comfortable leather chairs and Mark sat. His eyes wandered around the room - a whole wall was taken up with awards for scientific achievements and he wondered why he’d never heard of this company before. The glass door into the lab slid back and the CEO of Mercer Dynamics walked through, hanging her lab coat on a nearby stand.    
“Hi you must be Mark!”

She walked forwards and held out her hand to him.

“I’m Mercy Grey. My husband Patrick and I own Mercer Dynamics… I’m so glad you’ve decided to be part of our program. I take it that Cindy has filled you in?”

Mark nodded and was presented with a huge handful of papers.

“Great! Would you mind looking through these and then we can get you on your way down to the medical office for a physical. Do you have any serious medical conditions we need to know about?”   
Mark looked down at the large sheaf of papers and then back up the CEO.

“I, uh… have a heart condition where I can’t drink alcohol… and ADHD…”

Mercy smiled at him - it was disarmingly innocent and made her look like she was twelve.

“There’s no alcohol onboard the ship for professional reasons and I don’t think the ADHD will make much of an impact since you’ll just be doing what you normally do.”

Mark looked back down at the papers and started going through them. He read them carefully - they outlined his duties aboard the ship and his agreement to take on extra training in case of a crew-related emergency. It was the least frightening set of conditions he’d ever seen - even the iTunes terms and conditions were nastier. 

“Extra training?”

“We require all our crew members to have basic medical training. If you’re interested we can also provide you with additional training in any discipline you’d like… the sectors are listed on page twelve.”

Mark flipped through the pages and looked at the sectors.

“Engineering, defense, medical, navigation. Which one of them will let me fly the ship?”

“Navigation, but there’s limitations to learning to fly that you have to meet before they take off.”

He looked over the rest of the pages to make sure there wasn’t anything nasty hidden and finally signed the hell up. 

 

The next few hours were a blur - he had a celebratory glass of perfectly chilled juice with the two women and then was whisked off for a battery of tests and measurements. He was given a clean bill of health and a large plastic bottle of Mercer Dynamic-brand supplements that he was meant to take in the leadup to the launch. The testing had taken up most of the morning and it was mid-afternoon before he was released from the lab. Cindy whisked him off to the legal department where he had to sign a nondisclosure agreement and given an official date where he could announce it - it was only a few weeks in the future, but Mark was so excited that he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to hold it in. 

 

Mark was released blinking into the world with a copy of his contract clutched in his hand and a pocket full of mystery pills. He’d been invited for dinner with Mercy and her husband Patrick, and he wandered home to shower and get changed. In one day his life had completely flipped, and he sat at his desk to gaze blankly at his desktop background of the Earth-rise with a flutter of excitement. He was going to be able to look at his planet from space!


	2. Launch Day

The waiting had been the most difficult part. Mark had had to sit on the news that he was going into space for weeks, and by the time his nondisclosure agreement timed out (and Mercer Dynamics publically announced their mission) he was practically exploding to call and tell his family friends and finally his fans. Mark had recorded the announcement video the same day that he’d signed the contract and had been cleared medically, and had left it uploaded and rendered but unpublished until the time came. 

 

He was watching the Mercer Dynamics live announcement, and his mouse was hovering over the ‘publish’ button. He watched the explanation of the project - it was more scientific than the explanation he got, with lots of fancy charts and maps and graphs - and his face broke out into a huge grin when he was announced as part of the crew. Immediately, his Twitter feed exploded: he’d told his family to be watching the stream, although he hadn’t told them why. His mother called and while he was explaining it and soothing her worries he sat at his desk and published the video. Immediately the comments exploded, exceeding the number of comments on almost any other video he’d ever made, and Mark smiled wider than he’d ever smiled before. 

 

The next few weeks was spent going to and fro from Mercer Dynamics’ training grounds - they weren’t NASA but they did expect him to hit and maintain certain fitness goals before they catapulted him into space. He posted lots of pictures and short videos during this time, and it was during this time that he was finally able to tour the spaceship. Mercy herself came down to walk him through it, looking for all the world like a kid in a candy store. He hadn’t really noticed before but she was actually tiny - barely over five feet tall - and she had a tendency to shuck off her shoes and walk barefoot places despite warnings from her staff about it being dangerous. 

“This is the food prep area… kitchen? Galley? No idea what we’re supposed to call it, I mean it’s technically a ship so galley is probably appropriate, but I don’t know if a spaceship is covered by the same nomenclature as sea-going vessels… that’s one for the philosophy department. This is the crew quarters down this corridor - we’ve got a fairly small crew for this trip. We’ve tried having larger crews but at this point we’ve done so many trips we’ve got it nicely efficient.”

She gestured to one of the rooms and ushered Mark into it.

“And this is yours! We’ve done a complete upgrade on the walls - the very latest in our experimental soundproofing. There’s a special panel, here… you can put it over the door and it makes the room completely soundproof! You can scream yourself hoarse! And no one can hear you!”

She looked so proud of that Mark smiled at her. He touched the walls, admiring the soundproofing foam - it was unlike anything he’d ever seen before, extremely dense and made of something vaguely scratchy but otherwise unrecognisable. The rest of the room looked like a standard bedroom/office combination: the bed was built into the wall and the desk looked suitably sleek and sci-fi. The room had a great view of the side wall of the hangar.

 

Mercy hurried him along, taking him through the rest of the quarters and into what she referred to as ‘the pointy end’. It was full of interesting-looking consoles and a large viewing window, out of which Mark could see the hangar wall again. It would afford a fantastic view of space as the ship tore through it at alarming speeds. The CEO ushered Mark out and together they ducked around to the side of the ship where there were some sort of work being undertaken. It gave them an excellent look into the guts of the ship and Mark’s eyes roved over every inch of exposed internal wiring and components. Despite having a number of engineering classes under his belt the whole thing looked far too complicated for normal humans to follow - which was why it surprised him when Mercy stood there giving increasingly deep explanations of each of the parts. A man’s deep voice from nearby made him turn.

“Mercy I think you're in a spiral again.”

A tall broad-shouldered man with dark hair in a mechanic’s stained boiler suit appeared from under the ship and was approaching them. Mercy had stalled her explanations and cleared her throat.

“Mark Fischbach, this is Patrick Grey. He's my husband and co-owner of Mercer Dynamics.”

Patrick shook Mark’s hand and gave him an easy smile.

“I hate that high tech building. I prefer it in my own quiet lab out here. So you're going to be our guinea pig for the high-load data streaming project?”

“Yep that's me. I can't tell you how excited I am for this opportunity - it's been my dream since I was about 4 to be an astronaut.”

Patrick’s smile got wider.

“That's good to hear. This project has been our baby for a long time and it's always nice to meet people who are as passionate about space exploration as we are.”

Mark nodded eagerly.

“I totally am. I can hardly believe it's happening and that I can keep making videos while I'm up there! It's going to be so cool!”

Patrick clapped him hard on the shoulder - Mark’s knees buckled a little, Patrick was incredibly strong - and laughed.

 

*

 

Launch day approached far quicker than Mark thought it would. He breezed through every physical milestone (sometime to the amazement of the in-house doctors) and passed every test they gave him, and finally it was the day before the launch. He spent the day doing things he’d always wanted to do - restaurant hopping and sightseeing in the city he’d called home for such a short time. He spent the evening with his friends and passed out in blissful slumber around 11:30. 

 

The call came at 6am the next morning. A car was waiting for him outside, and Mark stumbled towards the front door grabbing his waiting bag on the way and headed for the Mercer Dynamics car idling at his front gate. He managed to get all the way to the car before it dawned on him that he was going into  **_SPACE_ ** . The whole ride to the facility was kind of surreal - the driver was quiet, the car engine was quiet, and it moved through the early morning traffic at a surprising speed. It left Mark alone with his thoughts. 

 

He’d been pretty nervous the day before but now he was just excited - he’d promised himself that he’d vlog and, with a quick glance at the driver, pulled out his phone and started his vlog.

“Hey guys, Markiplier here… on my way to the Mercer Dynamics launch facility. It’s, uh… about 6:15am… I gotta admit, I’m pretty excited about going into space. I still can’t believe it’s actually happening, it feels like someone’s playing a really elaborate prank. I’ve seen all the charts and calculations and been on the ship and talked to all the engineers and the other crew members and done all the training and prep but… it still feels like a mad fantasy or a fictional story.”

He paused to run his hands through his hair as he considered what he wanted to say.

“People a lot smarter than me have been over and over this, done all the checks, and they’re sure it will work. Mercer Dynamics is insanely awesome, they’re a wonderful group of brilliant people and this is going to be so much fun.”

He looked up and away, out of the window to take another second of consideration as the darkness outside stripped away to a soft blue dawn. 

“Still there’s always that… nagging feeling. That something’s going to go wrong and the ship’s going to go down or worse. It’s just one of those things you have to get over I guess.”

He gave the camera a meaningful look and then stopped recording. His beast of a computer had been loaded into the ship previously and he’d be able to edit and upload his vlog onboard.

 

His next hour was taken up with loading his bags into the room and stowing his belongings safely. He was given a final check by the medics and cleared for launch, and settled into his launch seat in the bridge of the ship. Everyone else was busy, so he fired up his phone again.

“Ok I’m on board the ship after some rather intrusive final medical checks. Everything is looking good and we’re about… maybe half an hour away from launch.” 

He looked up as the seat next to his was filled by the real engineer and then swung the camera around so she was in frame.

“Oh hey, ok this is Sophia. She’s the actual real engineer on the ship, who I’ll be assisting, in charge of looking after all the bits and pieces and making sure that we don’t suffer from explosive decompression or something equally as nasty. How’re you feeling?”   
The tiny woman looked over and smiled.

“Yeah it’s all looking good on my end. They’ve given me a weirdo as an assistant though, I’m not sure how much use he’s going to be.”

Mark made a shocked face at the camera and produced some noises of indignation. The two bantered back and forth as the rest of the crew trailed in. 

 

One by one he introduced them to the camera. Scarlett, the beautiful head of “security” with a bouncy blonde ponytail and a personality to match who looked like a cheerleader but could probably kill him with her pinkie. Juan and Carlos (cousins), who made up the rest of “security” and seemed to divide their combined time between the gym, the cafeteria and flirting with Scarlett. The pilot Nick was an adorable half-Chinese guy that barely scraped to five feet tall in a dinosaur t shirt - he was exceedingly cheery and optimistic all the time, to the point of irritating the people around him. Mark liked him. The captain was a tall Native American man with a roguish smile and a shiny gold earring called Malcolm - he constantly teased Sophia and had a wicked sense of humor. His second-in-command Naomi seemed constantly exasperated with the actions and decisions of her captain, clutching a Mercer Dynamics proprietary tablet like it was the only thing keeping her alive. The medical officer Andrea was very standoffish and refused to appear on camera, choosing to shove her hand into the lense if Mark got too close and duck away when she saw it. 

 

Mark had to put the camera away as they headed for launch. Each of them had their seat restraints checked by technicians and cleared, and then it was time to go. Nick the pilot was in control, and the sleek ship powered up and launched into the air with surprisingly little fuss. Mark watched the view from the window - the ground angled up to blue sky, streaking away and darkening to black rapidly as they shot through the levels of atmosphere at a speed impossible to describe. With one final burst of speed they broke away from gravity. It was done - Mark was in space. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And it's finally done and up and published oh my. Is anyone still even reading this? Ha... ha... I doubt it.
> 
> Yeah my IRL job got iNsAnE, hence so long between updates. I will try to get my act together now things seemed to have calmed down a little.

**Author's Note:**

> Just when you thought I was done writing Mark into improbable situations.


End file.
